Medical Miracle

This building housed the medical office of Dr. William Amiss, whose brother Dr. Thomas Amiss practiced in Slate Mills and later in Page County. During the Civil War, the two brothers achieved a rare medical feat after Maj. Richard Snowden Andrews, commanding Gen. Charles S. Winder’s artillery at the Battle of Cedar Mountain near Culpeper on August 9, 1862, was nearly disemboweled by an exploding Federal shell. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s surgeon, Dr. Hunter H. McGuire, judged his condition hopeless, and that evening Thomas and William Amiss, serving with the 31st and 50th Georgia Infantry, examined Andrews in a field hospital and agreed the wound was mortal. After Andrews insisted the doctors act, they washed the wound, returned his bowels to his abdominal cavity, and sewed the gash shut. Peritonitis did not develop, and seven weeks later Andrews was moving about on crutches. He returned to duty, was wounded again at the Second Battle of Winchester on June 15, 1863, later served as an advisor to the German army, and after the war resumed his career as an architect in Baltimore. He died in 1903 after years of recounting his survival and displaying the large scar left by the Amiss brothers’ stitching, and his extraordinary recovery is still sometimes cited in medical texts.

Sperryville, Virginia · United States